Richard Koshalek, the current president of Art Center College of Art of Design in Pasadena, California, is more than an administrator: He is a man with grand ideas.
When he was the director of MOCA, Koshalek oversaw the growth of what was then a fledgling art museum, sponsoring popular shows such as “Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses”—an exhibition that contributed to the resurgence of modern architecture. Koshalek also helped transform Art Center by commissioning Los Angeles talents, such as Daly Genik, to design new structures, including a downtown Pasadena campus and forthcoming student residences. Most recently, Koshalek has collaborated with other arts and science institutions and developed conferences, research, and publishing projects. Currently, he is collaborating on a Stefan Sagmeister–designed book and media project focusing on what to do when the Big Earthquake hits.
The nerve center for his cultural empire is his office in the Craig Ellwood–designed Art Center building in Pasadena. It has a bright red wall and a large round black table; both are covered in sketches of buildings in process, manuscripts, layouts, synopses for future conferences, and photos of Koshalek in the company of luminaries such as Frank Gehry and Pierre Boulez. He speaks in an enthusiastic, breathless style, as if mentally racing to the next idea. I asked him about why it matters to connect with the world in this way.
The whole idea is that institutions have a responsibility to deal with what happens in the classroom. But they also have a responsibility to the city and the community in which they exist. They have to set an example. And I think that there is a new leadership equation emerging where the decisions are made by the political leadership, the corporate leadership, but also by the creative leadership. The forces of change now, in society and continuing into the future, are going to be science, and the creation of new knowledge in science, and the creation of new knowledge within institutions like the Art Center College of Design. The idea was that this has to become a research institute; this has to become an institution that believes in ideas, that has the confidence to take on challenges within a larger context. If we do that then our students will become leaders in the future. They won’t be marginalized as creative people. It has always bothered me that designers and, to a certain degree, architects have always been marginalized, working for other clients, whether they’re corporate or government or whatever.
Very few, to tell you the truth. But I think there’s also a very interesting seismic shift happening, and I think that is because
of the new technology—like MySpace and YouTube and so forth and the Internet. What’s happening now is that the individual is becoming more important than ever before, and we are going to depend less on government organizations and political leadership, and even corporate leadership to a certain degree, and we’re going to be depending more on individuals to make their own decisions and provide leadership.
That’s right, and I think there’s something there. More than anything, though, I believe that architects, artists, and designers are the optimists of the future. I truly believe this. I’ve always listened to artists; I mean when I spent time with Robert Irwin or Richard Serra, I talk to them about the future. We talk about what’s coming next. This is true with architects. It goes way back to my interviewing Richard Neutra and Marcel Breuer and asking, “Where is the future here?”
When we got involved in picking the architect for Disney Hall, we traveled around the world to talk to conductors and visit orchestras and concert halls and acousticians. The one question that I asked of people, whether it was Pierre Boulez or Isaac Stern, or whoever it was, was, “Where is the future?” For me I never want to look back. I have this firm belief that the future might be unknowable, but it’s not unthinkable.
Yes, when I was in high school, I read about Breuer and I actually made a trip to New York to see him. I talked to him about the Bauhaus and he was fantastic, extraordinary, very generous. I remember asking him, “Who were the great teachers of the Bauhaus?” And he said, “For me, it wasn’t the architects.” He said, “It was the artists. I learned about form from Klee. I learned about color from Kandinsky. I learned about movement from Schlemmer.” He went through why and how all this impacted his architecture.
I felt then that it was time to do a comprehensive exhibition on an architect who actually changed the course of modernism. We made a very, very long list. Charles and Ray Eames were at the top of the list. We realized it would be best to start, not just with one architect, or even a small group of architects, but with a major initiative in Southern California that had an impact, not only in Southern California but globally, so we focused on the Case Study exhibition program. We documented it in great detail. We built two full-scale houses.
When we first started to do this exhibition, I went to see Esther McCoy (the architecture critic who wrote extensively about the Case Study program)—this is somebody I admired greatly—and we had lunch at Michael’s restaurant. It was an amazing lunch because she had an oxygen tank, and she was smoking a cigarette and she would turn off the oxygen tank, smoke the cigarette, turn on the oxygen tank. And I thought any minute Michael’s restaurant was going to disappear. But she said, “Richard, please do a wonderful, substantial Case Study exhibition.” She said that the work these architects did is still valid today as an influence.
So we did the exhibition, and its impact was huge. I think that architects today gained something from that experience, but then they added their own influences. That’s why we have such richness now. That’s why modernism, which is still alive in my mind, is much richer. It’s much more relevant to the world we live in today, and there is this sort of wide-ranging diversity of expression that comes from that. That’s why I think that architecture now is of greater interest than it’s ever been.
